Modernizing Enterprise

Content Management with

Microsoft Content Services

White paper

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 2

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Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 3

Contents Executive summary ............................................................................................................................................... 4

Traditional enterprise content management .............................................................................................. 4

Modern approach to content services .......................................................................................................... 5

Harvest ...................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Create ........................................................................................................................................................................ 8

Coordinate ............................................................................................................................................................ 10

Protect .................................................................................................................................................................... 13

Architecture .......................................................................................................................................................... 15

Summary ............................................................................................................................................................... 16

Calls to action ...................................................................................................................................................... 17

References ............................................................................................................................................................ 17

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 4

Executive summary After people, content is the most critical asset for every organization, embodying its knowledge and processes.

How content is created, managed, and shared—and how users collaborate with that content—has gone

through a drastic evolution from traditional enterprise content management (ECM) to dynamic content

services.

Microsoft SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business (henceforth referred to as SharePoint and OneDrive)

enable content services with great "content velocity," where the content picks up speed and value as it is

created, edited, and reused—becoming more useful over time. SharePoint supports over 270 different content

types including video and photos. This white paper showcases the enhanced and tightly integrated capabilities

of SharePoint and OneDrive that empower individuals, teams, and organizations to intelligently and securely

discover, share, and collaborate—transforming how enterprise organizations interact with and manage

growing volumes of content.

Industry analysts recognize that the term enterprise content management no longer reflects market dynamics

or the organizational needs for content in digital businesses. For application leaders, this means casting aside

previous notions and rethinking technology approaches.1 “Content services” is a better definition,

incorporating broader business content functions, including applications, platforms, and components.

According to industry experts, “Business content drives the day-to-day workplace experience. Business content

typically originates inside the enterprise, but the growing need to work with external stakeholders —

customers, partners, regulators, and citizens — is changing how EA pros assess vendors and prioritize

requirements.”2

A 2016 study by Nucleus Research3 reports that 4.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) is lost in the U.S.

on productivity as users search for existing content. At the same time, nearly 3.6 percent of GDP is spent on

re-creating content users can’t find. A typical company with revenues of $1 billion could expect to lose

approximately $43 million in productivity in time spent on searches and about $36 million in productivity in

time spent re-creating documents. In addition, the study found that the proper use of a content services

system such as SharePoint and OneDrive can save as much as $9.8 million annually for an organization with

1,000 users.

SharePoint and OneDrive enable modern content services that transform the lifecycle of content. By using the

full capabilities of Microsoft Office 365, organizations can extend these content services to Microsoft

Exchange, Skype for Business, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Planner, and many more, allowing content

to be found, consumed, and governed across all of Office 365. These capabilities are brought to the user

through the intuitive and familiar interface of the Microsoft Office Suite. Governance and security policies are

simple, intelligent, and automated to help protect content in all phases of the content lifecycle.

Traditional enterprise content management In traditional ECM, users created content freely—but after “publishing,” content moved to permanent silos,

preventing broad user access. These ECM solutions were based on what AIIM defined as "Systems of Record"4

to provide control throughout the capture, store, manage, deliver, and archive phases of the content lifecycle.

ECM was not designed for people who work with content daily, but for those who need to record the content.

1 Gartner. “Reinventing ECM: Introducing Content Services Platforms and Applications.” December 2016. 2 Forrester. “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Content Management – Business Content Services, Q2 2017.” April 2017. 3 Nucleus Research. “Content Bloat Drains Productivity by 8 percent.” June 2016 4 AIIM. “ECM at the Crossroads.” May 2013

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 5

Modern approach to content services Shaping and controlling content from creation to final disposition means many different things. It is time to

reflect the changes in how today’s content is created, shared, sustained, and reused. Content services

represents the next wave in ECM—a more focused suite of empowered capabilities than traditional ECM.

Content services is people-centric, allowing for personal management (copy, move, tag with metadata) and

organizational management (knowledge management, record retention, information lifecycle management).

Policies and security protect content at all phases of its life. Content services should supply business value

throughout a lifecycle, instead of after-the-fact management of dormant assets.

Figure a Content Services and Experiences

Content services exposes information and files through intrinsic platform capabilities, IT policies, and user-

oriented actions, extending information to many apps and devices to support business-centric outcomes, such

as:

• Accuracy

• Team formulation and extension

• Process acceleration

• Asset protection and control

• Insights and innovation

• Risk mitigation

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 6

Content services Content services is as much about creation as it is about consumption. Today, most information is found in

dynamic documents that are created and edited many times during their lifespans. At content velocity,

information picks up speed and relevance as it’s created, edited, and reused, becoming more valuable over

time instead of becoming a dormant archive. It’s an evergreen cycle of authoring, collaboration, control, and

reuse.

The four pillars of content services are:

• Harvest. Content shouldn’t be saved, stored, and managed to fill up storage space. Content exists to

support a future business purpose, such as providing information on a related decision or seeding the

next cycle of content creation.

• Create. Content velocity requires documents to be managed from the moment they’re created.

SharePoint and OneDrive allow you to create content using new tools such as Office Lens, or existing

tools like Office, to easily publish content to team sites or group members. Content types ensure that

content is shaped by templates, with rich metadata and governance policies.

• Coordinate. Structure your teamwork with co-authoring, metadata, groups, taxonomy, Microsoft

Flow, and PowerApps. In addition to working together, managed metadata provides a centralized way

to tag and classify information and structure libraries. You can tag content and customize the view

from the library home screen, so you don’t need multiple clicks to open a property-editing window.

• Protect. You can manage compliance and reduce risk with information lifecycle governance, including

information architecture, auditing, rights management, records and retention labels, and eDiscovery.

Figure b Content Services Lifecycle

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 7

Harvest Traditional ECM often concludes with document disposal or retention. But as noted earlier, content exists to

support a future business purpose, and users must be able to find it quickly when needed.

In typical enterprises, discoverable content exists in multiple places, and Office 365 searches across Exchange,

SharePoint, Skype for Business, and OneDrive to surface content quickly and easily.

Discover insights

SharePoint provides tools to discover relevant content across the organization.

Amplify content visibility

• Microsoft Graph-powered recommendations. SharePoint includes a modernized team site

experience with an engaging home page personalized by the intelligence of Graph—surfacing

documents and insights designed to make your business more productive. The activity on your

SharePoint home page provides insight into what’s happening—and who’s doing what—throughout

your team site.

• Microsoft Delve. Delve discovers new, relevant information based on the people and content you

interact with. It helps users discover the information that’s likely to be useful to them when they need

it. Users don’t need to remember the title of a document or where it’s stored—Delve suggests

documents based on machine learning about your work patterns and the patterns of your teams and

sites.

Figure c Microsoft Delve

• SharePoint and OneDrive activity reports. SharePoint and OneDrive activity reports provide a

holistic view of how your users collaborate. You can use the report to see which users are active on

SharePoint and engaged with team files. You can also see which users sync documents back to their

local machines, and whether they share documents internally or externally.

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• Search. With cloud hybrid search, content is crawled in place (on-premises and cloud) and combined

in the Office 365 search index. When users enter a query, they get security-trimmed search results

from the Office 365 search index, so they see results from both on-premises and Office 365 content.

Create SharePoint and OneDrive enable better ways to build new content and organize for records management,

productivity, and governance.

Create content that’s inherently managed

• Content types. A SharePoint content type defines a related set of documents. The item might be a

contract, presentation, policy, list, or folder. A content type associates this item with key metadata or

other information, such as a template or retention policy. You can specify the following attributes for

each content type:

o Workflows

o Information management policies

o Document template

o Document conversions

o Templates

• Team news. Team news helps you keep up with and broadcast key events and accomplishments. You

can use team news for trip reports, best practices, project updates, highlights of new documents and

content, welcoming a new team member, sharing team goals, and celebrating milestones. You can

easily and quickly create beautiful posts that are showcased on your team’s home page.

Capture content in real time

• OneDrive mobile app. OneDrive provides a place in the cloud where you can sync and access Office

365 file content. The OneDrive mobile app enables you to upload and share files, such as documents,

OneNote notebooks, photos, videos, and music.

• Office Lens. Office Lens digitizes notes from whiteboards; captures documents and business cards;

and trims and enhances images to makes them readable. You can use Office Lens to save images to

OneDrive and OneNote, or convert images to PDF, Word, and PowerPoint.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 9

Figure d Office Lens

• Copying or moving content from OneDrive to your team site, and vice versa. When you select a

file in OneDrive, you can copy directly to SharePoint, and vice versa. You can copy from OneDrive to

SharePoint, from SharePoint to OneDrive, from one location on a SharePoint site to another, or from

one SharePoint site to another.

Work with content anywhere, on any device

• Office integration. Inside Office clients, the Backstage view that is accessed by clicking on the “File

Tab” allows users to see document properties. If the document is from a SharePoint document library

that has versioning settings enabled, they can check the document in or discard the checkout.

• SharePoint mobile. This app enables you to access your team site activity and lists, view profiles, and

search. You can also view and create Team News. The app connects to SharePoint, SharePoint Server

2013, and SharePoint Server 2016.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 10

Figure e SharePoint Mobile Client and OneDrive Mobile Client

• OneDrive client. The OneDrive client has been enhanced to synchronize SharePoint team sites to

Windows and Mac—including files in Teams, Office 365 Groups, and OneDrive. It also provides On-

Demand Sync, which allows you to see all files, synced or not, locally on Mac and Windows.

Coordinate Office 365, powered by SharePoint and OneDrive, is where everyone you work with—both inside and outside

of your organization—comes together in real time to get work done. This means creating and sharing content

with the same familiar Office tools they use every day, in addition to third-party tools like the Adobe suite,

AutoCAD, and more. SharePoint makes file storage and document collaboration more people-centric, with

industry-leading mobile apps and improved mobile access to content, people, and applications.

SharePoint content, both on-premises and in the cloud, has long been maintained in a classic information

hierarchy of site collections, sites, and libraries, however, SharePoint also participates as part of a relational

hierarchy to a range of sites and other collaboration elements of Office 365, bound together by group

membership.

Content in SharePoint is maintained in document libraries, making it easy to structure graphically rich dynamic

views. The SharePoint managed metadata service (MMS) provides a centralized way to tag and classify

information to define a custom hierarchy of metadata tags.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 11

Share content with colleagues

• Document libraries. The document library is a secure location to create, share, and organize team files.

It’s designed to bring consistency for working on files throughout Office 365 while maintaining the full

power of SharePoint document libraries.

Figure f Modern Document Library

▪ Properties. Metadata navigation in large lists and libraries makes it easier for users to

find content through intelligent filtering or by using a navigation tree.

▪ Views. You can create a view and add columns to the list or library to enable more

flexible sorting, grouping, and filtering—for example, people might want to see only

documents that apply to their department or sort a list by project number.

▪ File viewing. Thumbnails show previews of documents, images, and videos.

▪ Pin to top. You can highlight important files, folders, or links in a document library in

SharePoint by pinning them to the top of the library.

• Send cloud attachments with Outlook. Cloud attachments are references to files stored in

SharePoint and OneDrive. Outlook attaches the file as a live link, which reduces message size while

preventing information bleed off to email. With SharePoint, you get a similar ability to share files as

Outlook attachments.

• Share files internally and externally. The files you store on SharePoint are usually available to

everyone who has permissions to the site, but you can also share links to specific files and folders with

people who need to access the content but aren’t team members.

Create content together in real time

• Collaboration. Multiple people can work together on a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or

PowerPoint presentation. Office includes tools such as comments, change tracking, and the ability to

see where everyone is and what they’re typing—as though they’re typing on your device.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 12

Automate approvals and content processes

• Automate your processes with Microsoft Flow. You can benefit greatly by connecting your data in

SharePoint to other data sources. Flow is now integrated directly into SharePoint lists and libraries.

Simply click Add flow, and then select a flow template from a panel. With Flow, you can easily build

alerts and approvals.

Figure g Adding Flow in SharePoint

Gather feedback and revisions

• Versioning. Versioning is enabled in libraries so you can track and manage information as it evolves.

You can look at earlier versions and recover them as necessary or retain multiple versions for legal

reasons or audit purposes. For sensitive information, it can be important to have only the official

version available to users. To accomplish this, you can require approval for an item or file before it

becomes visible to most site users.

Collaborate beyond the document

• Team and Group calendars. These calendars keep your team in sync by sharing everyone’s meetings,

project milestones, and vacation time using Office 365 Groups and Exchange integration. You can use

Outlook to view a calendar from an Office 365 Group side-by-side or overlaid with an Outlook

calendar allowing a tabular or combined view.

• Planner. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share

files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. It offers a simple, highly visual

way to organize teamwork.

• Yammer. Connecting with people and information across your organization, breaking down silos,

sharing best practices and creating engaged communities. Yammer enables collaboration, knowledge

sharing, and engagement across and beyond your company.

• Conversations in Microsoft Teams. Teams provides a single place for open and seamless persistent

chat. It brings together your team’s conversations, meetings, files, and notes. You can create different

chat channels for the team based on work streams or topics. Teams provides built-in access to

SharePoint, OneNote, and Skype for Business. Teams uses content services to surface content for

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 13

collaboration while maintaining organization control. As an example, within a Team chat, someone

attaches a document within the session—that document still resides in the document library for that

SharePoint Team Site.

Protect SharePoint builds on a long tradition of supporting information lifecycle governance, records management,

and eDiscovery. Newer capabilities, developed as part of our ongoing engagement with the entire Office 365

suite, as well as integration of recent technologies like Adallom and Equivio, include:

• Office 365 records management and retention. This new capability offered across Exchange, Skype,

OneDrive, and SharePoint allows an administrator to centrally define a policy label in the Security &

Compliance Center to enforce document retention and deletion policies. Labels can be set through

code, default settings, or user actions, and can be auto-applied based on sensitive information types

or keywords. Here are the key attributes of record declaration with Office 365 labeling:

▪ Unique – Every file in SharePoint is branded with a permanent, non-alterable

document ID.

▪ Variable – Multiple record categories can be defined as separate labels and applied

by appropriate user roles, or through automation or default values.

▪ Immutable – Moving beyond retention, a “record” label brands the content as

unalterable throughout the lifespan of the policy.

▪ Transferable – Only appropriate compliance roles can move or transfer records once

declared.

▪ Controlled destruction – Content labeled as a record cannot be deleted, and users

are advised that the deletion is blocked by policy. Automated document destruction

is enforced by retention policy and generates a fully auditable activity log in the

Office 365 Security & Compliance Center.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 14

Figure h Security and Compliance Center

• Information rights management. Files can be encrypted with Microsoft Azure Information

Protection/Rights Management Service and can still be used at supported endpoints, including

browsers, rich clients, and mobile Office clients. By requiring decryption on each access, files can be

freely copied while still limiting actions inside each file. Finally, revoking a key instantly renders all

copies unreadable, even if they have been distributed outside Office 365.

• Data loss prevention (DLP). The Security & Compliance Center provides a central location for

defining policies for 82 predefined information types or creating other custom information types.

When these types are detected, users can be advised about the policy or even automatically blocked

from sharing or distributing based on the dynamic policy definition.

• Auditing. When combined with unified auditing in hybrid deployments of SharePoint 2016, Office 365

can provide integrated logging of user and administrative actions on content for both on-premises

and cloud-based SharePoint and OneDrive locations.

• Conditional access polices. These policies can control or prevent access to content based on data

sensitivity, user location or device. For example, access can be blocked from certain countries or

limited to read-only views on personally owned devices.

Support privacy and compliance

• Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. The Security & Compliance Center is designed to help

you meet your organization’s legal, regulatory, and technical standards for content security and data

use. You can manage eDiscovery searches and holds, access for mobile devices, and more.

• Customer Lockbox. Customer Lockbox gives you control over your content. In the rare instances

when a Microsoft engineer needs access to your content to resolve an issue, you retain control and

visibility.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 15

• Customer key. By default, Microsoft manages your tenant encryption key. You might want to manage

your own tenant key to comply with regulations specific to your organization.

For more information, see the white paper File security in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

Architecture Some of the largest organizations keep virtually all enterprise content in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office

365—and Microsoft has expanded capacity to stay ahead of demand. You can store up to 12.5 exabytes (or 30

trillion items) per tenant, 25 TB per site collection, and files up to 15 GB. Microsoft's content services platform

is available in 40 regions globally and offers built-in redundancy with constant replication of data across

geographically separate datacenters. We also offer multi-geo tenant services distributed across multiple

datacenters for compliance with data residency requirements.

Depending upon the requirements, SharePoint can be deployed in four fundamental models.

• SharePoint on-premises – You plan, deploy, maintain, and customize your SharePoint environment in

an environment completely managed and maintained by your organization including hardware,

software, security, updated and patches.

• SharePoint Hybrid – Cloud-first doesn’t mean cloud-only, Microsoft brings the cloud to your

business empowering your users with the latest in Office 365 innovation enriching traditional on

premises workloads with cloud capabilities.

• SharePoint Online and OneDrive – SharePoint is always up to date, but you are responsible for

managing SharePoint itself. SharePoint Online and OneDrive are Microsoft managed cloud-based

infrastructure that brings comprehensive, most secure cloud productivity and communication

offerings.

• SharePoint in Azure/IaaS – You extend or migrate your on-premises environment into Microsoft

Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for production, disaster recovery, and dev/test SharePoint

Server 2016 farms.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 16

Figure i Information Architecture in SharePoint

Figure j Information Architectural Site Map

Summary Microsoft provides end-to-end content services. SharePoint and OneDrive give you enriched capabilities for

creation, collaboration, protection, and harvesting of content to provide intelligent information use.

Modernizing Enterprise Content Management | 17

SharePoint and OneDrive provide industry-leading content services with the scale, governance, and protection

that organizations require, and your organization most likely already has access to SharePoint through your

Office 365 subscription or Enterprise Agreement.

You can now adopt SharePoint and OneDrive more efficiently with Microsoft FastTrack, a program in which

Microsoft specialists work with you remotely to get your Office 365 environment ready to use, and plan rollout

and usage within your organization. Microsoft experts also work with you to drive usage of SharePoint and

migrate data from a variety of on-premises and cloud sources.

Calls to action Check out these resources to inform your migration to the modern content services platform built on

SharePoint and OneDrive.

Learn

• SharePoint videos and tutorials

• SharePoint hybrid sites and search

• Use SharePoint Online as a B2B extranet solution

• Plan hybrid OneDrive for Business

Plan

• SharePoint planning guide for Office 365 for Business

• Technical diagrams for SharePoint 2016

• SharePoint hybrid sites and search

Try

• Register for an Office 365 trial

Sign up

• SharePoint plans & pricing

References Install and configure SharePoint Server 2016

SharePoint Server 2016

New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016

Discover enterprise content management (ECM) powered by SharePoint

Hybrid in SharePoint Server 2016